My Little Po-Mo: Unauthorized Critical Essays on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Season Four and Beyond

By Jen A. Blue

This is the journey from Crown to Kingdom.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic's fourth season did something few shows attempt: it explored what happens after the Hero's Journey is over. Once childhood ends and enlightenment is attained, what comes next? This collection of essays looks at how the show tries to answer that question, and the curious resonances that result between its attempts and two real-world mystical traditions, all connected by a crystal tree. Along the way, you might discover:

-How the show handles, and fails to handle, the possibility of queer kids
-Whether the show did right by its most important viewers, the little girls it was made for
-What the Cutie Mark Crusaders have to do with being trans
-Why we climb trees
-And much, much more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jen A. Blue
• Release date: Dec 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005950675

Jen A. Blue

Jen A. Blue is a third-generation geek and lifelong animation buff. She has a degree in English from George Mason University, and lives in Baltimore, where she is studying to become a therapist. She is proudly trans, gay, and Jewish, and starting to be pretty Buddhist, too. Her favorite pony is Fluttershy, her favorite captain is the Sisko, and her favorite Doctor is Peter Capaldi. You can find more of her writing and videos at JenABlue.com.

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Dear Princess Celestia… (Introduction)

Portions of this introduction were previously published on my blog as We have to find them before ponies start to panic (Day of the Doctor)/Where I've always been going: Home, the long way around (Princess Twilight Sparkle).(1)

Saturday, November 23, 2013 was a day of new directions.

It often is, of course. Biblically, Saturday was the day after creation, a long deep breath before history began. In real life, as the day after the workweek ends for those of us lucky enough to have a defined workweek, it's a day for the sort of leisure activities that make self-discovery and expression possible, the day when we theoretically connect with friends or work on our hobbies and interests. Life-altering experiences tend not to happen when we're going about our regular routines, and there's rarely time for much else on workdays.

The end of Season Three of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic left the series in a curious position. In many ways it felt worryingly final, because it was, in hindsight, the expected ending of the series. If the show followed the Hero's Journey, as most shows and films do at this point, then that journey was at an end: our hero, Twilight, had found her answers, completed her quests, and ascended to quasi-divine status, at least within the context of the show. Where else could there be left to go?

When one reaches the end of the road, there really are only three options: stop, turn back, or find a new road to travel in a new direction. The first is the expected ending, and the second means retreading old ground. Only the third allows for the exploration of something new.

And so this particular Saturday represented that choice for Friendship Is Magic: the moment at which it took the third option. It was, not coincidentally, a milestone; Princess Twilight Sparkle marked the beginning of the fourth season of Friendship Is Magic, meaning it now had more seasons than the other two My Little Pony TV series combined–and later that season would surpass them in combined episode count as well. It was a highly entertaining episode, though not quite in the top tier of the show. What it did do, however, was dramatically transform key elements of the show, removing long-standing plot devices and introducing new ones.

Princess Twilight Sparkle had strong running themes of time and memory, with significant flashbacks and a menace from the past, long-buried, emerging in the present. It dealt with these themes rather lightly, of course, being mostly concerned with how Twilight and her friends deal with her new role as princess, and reassuring the audience that this will not derail the show or her character. This is demonstrated multiple times, such as Rarity saying that they need to meet to talk about redecorating her loft, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie contradicting Rarity's claim that every pony dreams of becoming a princess, and Twilight's nervous freakout (now with added flight-based physical comedy).

But it was also heavily about visiting moments that have been teased from the beginning of the series–the rise and fall of Nightmare Moon, Celestia and Luna's battle with Discord, and the origin of the Elements of Harmony. It was more or less what we expected, except that the origins of the Elements of Harmony were something of a surprise–they originated from the newly introduced, crystalline Tree of Harmony, which we must assume is the axis mundi of Equestria, its World Tree.

Crystal trees have actually always been a personally relevant symbol for me, since they visually resemble a neuron and thus can be both the axis mundi and the axon, the Tree of the World and the individual soul. Much of this book—in particular, the chapters on those episodes that take part in the running arc of the season—is about that symbol, and two (related) mystical traditions that involve climbing a tree that represents both the world and the individual soul: Jewish Kabbalah and the European occult tradition that appropriates from it, particularly the British tradition of hermetic magic and its offshoots.

I have thus consciously chosen to go out on a limb, as it were, and relate the seasonal arc to the process of spiritual enlightenment via ascension up the Tree, as depicted variously in both traditions. This is an inherently risky proposition in numerous ways, though two stand out as the biggest risks. The first is simply that the arc might not fit with the narrative approach I've chosen to take to it. It is almost certainly not the case that anyone involved in the show was actively thinking about the mystical traditions I discuss in this book; it is possible that no one involved in decision-making was even aware they existed.

The second issue is more simply stated, but difficult to address: how to do this without deeply disrespecting the traditions I'm discussing. Kabbalah is an artifact of my own Jewish heritage, a culture which has been ruthlessly strip-mined by the larger European/Christian culture essentially since the latter's inception. By tying our own sacred traditions to a cartoon, I risk abetting that relentless appropriation. Not that I could appropriate my own culture—an absurdity in itself—but rather that I could encourage others to continue the appropriation that has already occurred. But I've never worried about that when alluding to traditions outside my own in other books, so I have to question why I'm taking these more seriously—a matter of some personal reflection I've had to undertake outside the scope of this book.

Nonetheless, as I believe I show in the chapters to follow, it fits, and it gives us an approach by which to consider the primary question this season must answer, and in turn a fundamental question of life in general: the Hero's Journey is the story of adolescence, the transition from childhood to adulthood. In a culture that rarely tells any other story, what comes next?

That is an important question for the show, which helps keep the discussion to come rooted within it. And, too, it is an important question for our lives, which helps keep focus on the fact that we are actually discussing something that matters and deserves respect.

About This Book

Much like previous volumes of the My Little Po-Mo series, this final volume has a spine of sorts in the form of a series of essays discussing each of the episodes of Season Four, treating two-part episodes such as Princess Twilight Sparkle and Twilight's Kingdom as a single, unusually long episode. Unlike those other volumes, this book also covers several episodes from later seasons. While the Season Four chapters are in chronological order by airing date, the other episodes are not, instead being placed wherever they are most relevant to discussions in surrounding chapters. The other episodes discussed are:

Season Five, Episode 9: Slice of Life (Chapter 10)

Season Six, Episode 13: Stranger Than Fanfiction (Chapter 13)

Season Five, Episode 13: Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep? (Chapter 23)

Season Five, Episode 18: Crusaders of the Lost Mark (Chapter 26)

Season Five, Episode 15: Rarity Investigates! (Chapter 32)

All of the episode chapters are titled using a line spoken by that episode's focus character in a different episode, with the exception of Chapter 10, which is titled like the chapters about derivative and fan works, for reasons that should become clear after reading it.

Speaking of, several chapters are about derivative works, a term which I am using decidedly non-derogatorily to mean works which are not part of Friendship Is Magic or My Little Pony proper, but would not exist without it. These are titled using memes that are or were common among bronies or other fans. The works discussed are:

Neighquiem for a Dream, an autobiographical study of the series by Sam Keeper (Chapter 11)

Ponyfinder, a tabletop RPG based on the Pathfinder system and heavily influenced by Friendship Is Magic (Chapter 27)

Ponyville Confidential, a history of the My Little Pony franchise and surrounding culture by Sherilyn Connelly (Chapter 34)

A guest chapter by Sean Dillon on the webcomic Discorded Whooves (Chapter 39)

The next group of chapters is the Elements of Harmony series, continued from previous books. These are all commissioned by backers of the Kickstarter that funded Vol. 3, and each makes an argument for why a given character (selected by the commissioner) should be considered Best Pony. Like all the chapters not part of the Season Four spine, they are placed wherever they were most relevant to the discussion in the surrounding chapters. The characters requested for this book were:

Cadance (Chapter 16)

Twilight Sparkle (Chapter 20)

Finally, there are essays which don't fit any particular category. Many of these were commissioned by backers of the Kickstarter that funded this book (as are some of the later-episode and derivative-work chapters), and others are simply topics I wanted to address outside of any particular episode, or across multiple episodes. They have no specific naming convention; some use a quote from the show, others from other sources, and still others just have a descriptive title. These include:

An introduction to the Kabbalistic imagery and terminology I use throughout the book (Chapter 2)

A piece on why and how fandoms in general, and bronies in particular, have gone wrong (Chapter 12)

A study of Luna, Sunset Shimmer, and Starlight Glimmer as Shadow archetypes of Twilight Sparkle (Chapter 22)

An examination of whether and to what extent Friendship Is Magic succeeded as a show for little girls (Chapter 35)

A defense of the character I have been consistently hardest on, Spike the Dragon (Chapter 37)

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the generous contributors to its Kickstarter:

Aleph Null

Alison Barber

Ashgill Phyre

Baxil

Christa Mactíre

Colin Maclaughlin

Colin Pinnick

David J. Webb

Cynthia Snook

Jessica Flores

Kiya Nicoll

Lars Engebretsen

Laureninspace

Nicole Barovic, on behalf of Alex, Kim, Bridget, Marley, Nikki,

and the Madtown Bronies

Paul Emily Ryan

phyphor

Robert Hedley

Shane Martin DeNota-Hoffman

Susan Smith Webb

Susan Sutton

And everyone who chose to be anonymous!

As always, I would also like to thank Viga Gadson, for getting me into the series in the first place and designing both the logo and covers for every book in this series, and my editor Lex Winter for tirelessly pushing me to write the best book I can.

On a more personal note, I would like to thank my family and friends for making my own transition from something else to princess as smooth and peaceful as any I've heard of, above all my beloved Susan—and in turn I'd like to thank My Little Po-Mo for bringing her into my life, since we met at a convention Friendship Is Magic panel I was on. Quite a neat little circle, is it not?

Let's close this one by returning to the date we started with: It's November 23, 2013...

Chapter 1 | Did you say she was a tree? (Princess Twilight Sparkle)

There is a room in my dreams. Or there was, once; I haven't dreamed of it in nearly twenty years.

The room is perfectly cubical, about fifty feet on a side. The walls, floor, and ceiling are transparent, and through them I can see that the room floats in a vast black void. The only thing in the room, the only source of light, is a shining crystal tree rising proudly from the center of the floor, its uppermost branches touching the ceiling. Blue lightning sparks from the branches, flows down the trunk, trickles along the roots to vanish into the floor.

In the center of each wall is an arch. Through each arch is a room just like this one—no, it is this room. If I stand at the edge of the archway, so the trunk of the tree does not block my view, I can see myself from behind.

The room, in the dream, is the entire world. The tree is me.

It is not a particularly difficult dream to interpret. The tree is the axis mundi, the World Tree, the Tree of Light and of Life. Its color, its shape, and the lightning all announce that it is a neuron, too.

The dream ended when I started researching Kabbalah. This may not be a coincidence.

—

Let us enter the Kingdom.(2) This is supposed to be about ponies, so it might as well be Equestria as any other kingdom. This is where the Tree is rooted, where the Light, the rainbow, the Bridge of Heaven touches the earth. The tree appears to grow up from the ground and emit the light, but in truth it is the other way around; the World emanates from the Tree as the Tree emanates from the Light.

This is the realm of the material, where Harmony loses purity, becoming unbalanced. Beneath the world, as the Light is above, there is the Darkness, the Silence, the Absence of Light; the world acts as a filter, catching the light. Beneath the world is the Tree of Darkness, the qlippothic reflection of the Light; not the opposite of light but its distortion, the unbalanced elements.

Once, you see, the Tree was whole and harmonious, but then chaos entered the world. The vessels were taken from the Tree. The Light scattered, the vessels were divided, the spark hidden. The opposite of Harmony is not Discord, as one might expect; we learned back in Volume 2 that Discord is merely the process of change to a new kind of Harmony. The opposite of Harmony is Silence; the unbalancing thereof is Discord.

Now the tendrils of the Tree of Darkness, of Death, of Discord are everywhere in this world, seeking ever to steal the magic, the Light, the world. The sources of the Light are occulted away—like an eclipse, but not quite the same. Not Moon obscuring Sun (that comes later as it came before), but Sun and Moon trapped in the same chaotic space.

But as below, so above. We have performed alchemy with this series before, just to ascend to this point. Now we do it again.

—

Consider the Tree itself, that smooth crystalline trunk, the Foundation of the world and of the branches above both. This is the point where the Light enters the World. What Harmony is to be found in this broken world enters it here. Sun and Moon, passion and intellect, power and symbol, are brought together and held here. This is the final part of the tree itself, the last emanation to come directly from the source.

If the vessels are not brought back together, if the Light wanes, if the Kingdom falls—when the Kingdom falls—this is where the darkness will strike. This is where its creeping tendrils wrap and squeeze and poison.

The Kingdom has already fallen. The princesses are nowhere to be found, two stolen, one too distant to be of help, one sent away by her friends—for her protection, ironically. How can we save the Tree and restore the Kingdom?

Maybe the answer is higher up, further back, closer to the source. Chug the elixir. Climb the tree.

—

A rayed sun. A shining moon. Two sisters. We encounter Majesty first, the one who separates herself, the one who sits in judgment. The intellect, the one who deals in symbols, where intentions take shape into comprehensible constructions. The shaper of form, morpheus, Dream. Yet also that which submits, the lesser one, the one who was defeated.

Victory, the one who defeated the other, the eternal, the long-suffering. Passion and emotion, the empathic one, yet also patient. She is kindness presaged by harshness, the guiding hand you barely realize is leading you by the nose.

One rose in jealousy against her sister, and was banished for a thousand years. For a thousand years, the Sun mourned alone while others celebrated the loss of her sister.

They are the feet, the hooves, on whose backs the others stand, the upper trunk from which the branches rise. Once they were in balance, united, harmonious, but then strife came, chaos, Discord. The Nightmare Moon, the battle of sisters, one vengeful, the other determined, a surprising burst of violence that nonetheless does not feel out of place. The vessels were brought together, but one person cannot truly unite them alone; all they could do was fight and imprison and banish. The Healing of the World was not achieved.

There are no answers here. Drink. Climb.

—

A star. The Adornment, jewels and necklaces and headgear, the spirit, the balance. The one that unites the higher branches, the bringing together of the vessels, the tzaddik.(3) The Anointed One who wears the Crown (but more on that later). Perhaps she died and returned, perhaps she is a Goddess; maybe that was someone else. Accounts vary.

But she brought them together, the bearers of the vessels. They were shattered into countless shards, but she and her companions reunited them. She reignited the spark. She healed that which was broken, once, ending the Nightmare Moon and restoring the Dream. If anyone can heal the Tree, heal the World, restore the Kingdom, it is she.

As it turns out, anyone can.

But she cannot do it alone. She must have something to unite. Quaff and ascend.

—

Another level. Two more shining symbols, vessels of light.

Strength, that which rejects what is false. Here's where we have to admit how tenuous this all is; the tree in the show is missing yesod, forcing us to imagine it in the trunk itself; hod and netzach are stacked instead of side-by-side; and now, worst of all, gevurah and chesed are outright swapped! The apple and the butterfly are in each other's positions, if this reading is to work at all. It's too bad; an apple would be perfect here. After all, in the false version of this story, the simplified, lie-to-children one that everyone knows, it's an apple that leads to the tree being taken away. Or some unspecified fruit, anyway; it might as well be an apple, even if some prefer a pomegranate or even an etrog.(4) It definitely wasn't a butterfly.

Regardless, strength and honesty alone are too harsh, too unforgiving, too practical. Driving Twilight away, even though it hurt her, was the obvious, practical, logical, correct thing to do. It was also wrong. Kindness is needed on the opposite side of the tree, for balance. Grace, compassion, the unconditional love that might be a bit gentler than is wise, since it loves even Discord. Look at the new opening credits for this season—Kindness let Discord into the Tree itself! (Well, a tree, anyway, and every tree is in some sense the Tree.)

There is nothing beyond the text, as has been said. Outside the room is the void, which means everything must be inside the room, whether we can see it or not. Everything that is not visible within the text is invisible within the text, waiting only for us to find it. Every tree is in some sense the Tree, and therefore this tree is the Tree, swapped cutie marks or no.

The answer begins to form: climbing the Tree is itself the path to healing the Tree. Bringing the vessels back together is the restoration of the Kingdom and the Healing of the World. We must surrender them, return them to where they came from.

It remains only to witness them all, higher in the Tree of Light, deeper in the Cup of Life.

—

Intuition and Creativity, placed exactly where they needed to be. The gap crossed, our momentary crisis of doubt transcended. The reading works like a guided tour. If you look to your left you will see the intuitive, revealed wisdom that descends out of the unknown, the inexplicable twitching tail that lets you dodge a thorny, aggressive branch of the Black Tree. Those of you on the right side of the trunk can look over at the creative energy, the generous gift of previously nonexistent potentials.

Discord must have known that Celestia and Luna were working against him. He knew of the